If you’ve ever played laser tag or paintball, you know that hiding from your adversaries is critical. In the arena, this can look like hiding behind a large structure or crouching on the ground. You want to move stealthily to evade detection, keeping your opponents on the look out while still trying to achieve your objective.
For attackers, the enterprise environment is the game arena. Once they gain unauthorized access to systems, they want to move stealthily and remain undetected so they can achieve their damaging objectives, like data theft or malware deployment. Many use lateral movement, a process allowing them to pivot between systems, escalate access, and blend into normal administrative activity.
By understanding lateral movement as a security risk, organizations can implement appropriate mitigation strategies to protect critical business assets and sensitive data.
What is lateral movement?
Lateral movement refers to techniques that threat actors use to move deeper into an environment after gaining initial access. Once they gain an initial foothold, they systematically explore the environment, moving from the original compromised endpoint to identify high-value targets that contain sensitive information or enable remote control, like:
- Domain controllers.
- Sensitive file shares.
- Database servers.
Security professionals use lateral movement to describe how attackers escalate privileges to access increasingly sensitive and business critical systems.
Why do attackers use lateral movement?
Lateral movement enables attackers to evade detection since they can try to blend into legitimate access and network traffic.
Expand network access
Typically, initial compromise provides access to a single endpoint or low-level user account. Lateral movement enables attackers to move deeper into the environment and potentially access:
- Critical infrastructure to disrupt business operations.
- Sensitive data to sell on the dark web.
- More valuable user accounts, like admin accounts with privileged access.
Escalate privileges
Attackers usually use lateral movement to access these sensitive resources. Privilege escalation enables them to move across systems means they can identify:
- Cached credentials.
- Poorly secured service accounts.
- Privileged users for broader environment control.
Reach high-value targets
Usually, the initial compromised devices are only useful for gaining initial access, not the attack’s primary target. Using lateral movement, threat actors can locate assets that increase the leverage and profitability of the breach, like systems that store:
- Financial records.
- Customer data.
- Intellectual property.
- Backup, backup repositories.
Maintain persistence
Relying on access to a single compromised system means attackers can lose access if the security team isolates or remediates the affected device. Lateral movement enables threat actors to establish multiple footholds across the network so defenders have a more difficult time fully eradicating them during incident response.
Avoid detection
Lateral movement allows attackers to hide as legitimate users, and organizations often have difficulty identifying suspicious internal activity. Attackers use lateral movement to mimic legitimate behavior so they can operate within trusted systems and avoid triggering security alerts.
Prepare for large-scale attacks
Ransomware and other destructive attacks often depend on threat actors gaining access before execution begins. Threat actors use lateral movement to maximize operational impact because it allows them to:
- Map dependencies.
- Identify critical systems.
- Position malware across the environment.
What are some lateral movement techniques that attackers use?
To evade detection, attackers often abuse legitimate administrative functions as part of moving laterally within systems.
Credential Theft and Dumping
To move between devices with legitimate credentials, attackers often use data from compromised devices, including:
- Usernames
- Passwords
- Password hashes.
- Authentication tokens.
Pass-the-Hash Attacks
Attackers may use stolen password hashes to authentication directly to other systems. THis process allows them to move laterally while avoiding traditional password-based detection controls.
Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) Abuse
To connect to internal systems after gaining unauthorized network access, attackers often abuse legitimate remote access tools, like RDP. Since IT teams commonly use RDP, threat actors can hide their malicious activity and blend into normal administrative behavior.
SMB and Administrative Share Abuse
Attackers often abuse normal Windows file-sharing and administrative pathways to move inside a network, like the SMB (Server Message Block). Since these protocols are widely used in enterprise networks and support trusted internal communication, attackers use them to:
- Transfer files.
- Execute commands.
- Spread malware across Windows environments.
Pass-the-Ticket Attacks
In Active Directory environments, attackers may steal Kerberos tickets and reuse them to authenticate as legitimate users without needing passwords. This technique helps attackers maintain stealth while escalating access across domain-connected systems.
PowerShell Abuse
PowerShell is widely used by administrators to:
- Execute commands.
- Run scripts.
- Remotely control systems.
Since identifying malicious usage from legitimate activity is difficult, attackers often use it instead of deploying obvious malware.
Remote Service Execution
Attackers may create or abuse remote services to execute malicious code on other systems within the network. They can leverage trusted system functionality to:
- Spread tooling.
- Deploy ransomware.
- Establish persistence.
Exploitation of Weak Privileged Access Controls
Poor credential hygiene, excessive permissions, and shared administrator accounts make lateral movement significantly easier for attackers. Once a privileged account is compromised, attackers can often access multiple systems without needing additional exploits.
Active Directory Enumeration
Threat actors frequently map Active Directory environments to identify:
- Privileged users.
- Critical servers.
- Trust relationships.
- Security gaps.
Using this reconnaissance, they can plan a more efficient attack path toward high-value assets and domain-wide compromise.
PsExec and Remote Administration Tools
To run commands remotely, administrators use utilities like the Microsoft Sysinternals tool PsExec. Attackers commonly abuse these utilities because they are trusted and frequently used in enterprise environments yet overlooked during an attack’s early stages.
What tools do security teams use to prevent and detect lateral movement?
Malicious actors use lateral movement during attacks because security teams struggle to detect the suspicious activity. Most security teams use various tools to take a multi-layered approach to risk mitigation and detection strategy.
Technologies that organizations should consider incorporating into their lateral movement monitoring and risk mitigation strategy include:
- Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR): Monitors endpoint security and activity such as process execution, credential access, and remote command behavior to detect suspicious movement between machines and block malicious activity in real time.
- Authentication monitoring: Tracks login attempts, session activity, and credential usage across systems to identify abnormal access patterns that indicate stolen credentials or lateral movement.
- Identity and Access Management (IAM): Controls and enforces who can access what systems and resources, reducing lateral movement by limiting excessive permissions and enforcing least-privilege access.
- Network traffic analysis: Inspects internal network communication to detect unusual east-west traffic patterns that suggest unauthorized movement between systems.
- Intrusion Detection Systems / Intrusion Prevention Systems (IDS/IPS): Monitors network activity for known attack signatures and suspicious behavior, alerting on or blocking attempts to exploit internal systems or spread laterally.
- User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA): Uses behavioral baselines to detect deviations in user or system activity that may indicate compromised accounts being used for lateral movement.
- Deception technology: Deploys fake systems, credentials, or data to lure attackers, triggering alerts when they attempt lateral movement into decoy environments.
- Log analysis: Aggregates and correlates logs from endpoints, servers, and network devices to identify patterns of suspicious access or movement across systems over time.
Best Practices for Mitigating Lateral Movement Risk
By implementing a defense-in-depth strategy and correlating data across various attack entry points, organizations can mitigate lateral movement risk.
Network segmentation
By isolating systems and separating them into distinct zones based on asset criticality and sensitivity, organizations make it more difficult for an attacker who compromises one area to freely move across the entire network. This limits the blast radius of a breach and forces additional security barriers between environments.
Principle of least privilege access
By restricting user access to only the permissions they need to perform their job functions, organizations limit the impact that a single compromised account can have across the environment. Applying the principle of least privilege reduces lateral movement by preventing attackers from using over-permissioned accounts to access unrelated systems.
Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
To mitigate risks arising from stolen credentials, MFA requires additional verification beyond a password, such as a mobile prompt or hardware token. By making it more difficult to authenticate into the system, MFA reduces lateral movement risk by tightening boundaries at the initial attack vector, reducing the likelihood that attackers can gain initial unauthorized access.
Privileged access management (PAM)
Organizations should implement controls, monitoring, and limits around the use of administrative accounts. By tightly governing these high-risk credentials, they can mitigate risk and detect attackers attempting to use these privileged accounts to expand access.
Regular credential rotation
Frequently updating passwords and access keys can reduce the usefulness of stolen credentials. By rotating credentials regularly, organizations can reduce attackers’ ability to reuse compromised credentials to move between systems.
Patch management
By monitoring for vulnerabilities, organizations can more rapidly update systems that have known security weaknesses. Applying security updates in a timely manner reduces lateral movement opportunities by closing exploitable weaknesses that attackers use to pivot deeper into the network.
Endpoint hardening
Enforcing secure configurations includes removing unnecessary software and disabling unused services on devices and cloud services. This reduces lateral movement attack paths by shrinking the number of ways attackers can execute code or escalate access.
Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA)
A ZTA assumes that all users and devices are compromised, requiring them to verify access continually. This limits lateral movement by requiring constant authentication and validation, even inside the internal network.
Graylog: Scalable SIEM for Mitigating Lateral Movement Risk
Graylog Security enables organizations to strengthen visibility across their environment and reduce lateral movement risk by centralizing and analyzing security telemetry from across endpoints, users, and network activity. By correlating authentication events, log data, and system behavior, Graylog helps security teams detect early indicators of a cyber-attack such as credential misuse from phishing attacks or unusual internal movement patterns associated with ransomware attacks.
With real-time monitoring and centralized log analysis, Graylog reduces dwell time by helping teams quickly identify suspicious activity and respond before attackers can escalate privileges or move deeper into the environment. This improves the effectiveness of existing security controls by turning raw event data into actionable insight, enabling faster investigation and more precise containment of lateral movement.
